My friend, you must not have been around during the days we would print out directions from Mapquest before every trip. I remember when Google Maps was first announced, I sat there dragging the map around my screen and was amazed to see the tiles fill in. It was like nothing else at the time.
Ah, you should’ve seen what we had before Google Maps — https://images.app.goo.gl/JQ5xAhP8HpZjRNby7 The map was a static image, you had to click to change zoom levels and wait for the entire page to reload, or click to move in a cardinal direction and then agonizingly wait for the page to reload. The idea you could have infinite scrolling tiles of map with a simple way to map directions that auto-completed street names parsing from a plain English search — that was basically a revelation. :) Though MapQuest did give decent directions and a nice overview of where you were going.
Before that, you had to buy a book every year to keep in a glove compartment and look up street names in an alphabetical index, then go to a page number, look for a row and column and then plot a route by flipping between many pages or having traveled there before (aka getting lost) https://images.app.goo.gl/SdS9Z1rfs3HPJJwA9
Also a Google Maps innovation—trying to accurately put street numbers on a map. You’d often know, in some books, where street numbers began and ended at intersections, but it was extra detail and was often left out or entirely wrong. Of course it’s still wrong today, but street view really changed all that.
Yes seriously. Does nobody remember MapQuest? Even that was revolutionary compared to what came before, but had no ability to move the map dynamically, and this was the state of the art until Google Maps launched. I remember sitting in an office with two other students and my graduate advisor the first time we used Google Maps, and our mouths were literally agape. My advisor said “the people who can make this work are going to run the world,” which was sort of accurate. Same feeling the first time I used a good capacitive-touch display with snapback and inertial scrolling: ideas that may seem obvious when you’ve used them for a lifetime, but sure aren’t obvious beforehand.
OP suggested this was happening back in the day. Either way:
MapQuest didn't suck because of its UI model. MapQuest sucked because it was clunky, slow, and cluttered. Its implementation was crap.
When you look at today's MapQuest, they've largely corrected this. The maps are much less ugly, they now pick a (somewhat) reasonable level of detail based on your zoom level and moving around the map is fast whether you're using their joystick control or dragging the map.
The sad thing is, none of this is rocket science. It shouldn't have taken them this long to figure out. Google Maps steadily, inevitably eroded their market share and last I heard, they were 10% behind.
I remember something very similar - I wasn't even a Google fan then and I remember just not wanting to go back to Mapquest after having seen Google Maps.
Maps had smooth, animated panning and zooming that updated the map in real time without reloading the page. MapQuest and the other major competitors at the time only allowed panning and zooming by clicking buttons on the side of the map, which scrolled a predefined number of steps and reloaded, at least initially, the entire page when you did so.
Google Maps was also less cluttered and used the browser's real estate much effectively. MapQuest was a small, cramped map by comparison.
Really? I remember when I first used Google Maps coming from being a Map Quest user, I was blown away that I could scroll without having to refresh the page.
Maybe you don’t remember when Google started inserting its own maps at the top of location searches in place of the top-result: MapQuest. Probably a good 15 years ago.
Yeah, god, I long for the days before Google Maps, too. Who needs that slick slippy interface when you can endlessly click arrows at the corner of a static image?
Yes this is infuriating. The old google maps was excellent at adding street labels everywhere using just the font size and layout. It was more on par with his traditional paper maps used to be designed. Maximize the information for the user. Nowadays online maps are no longer thought to be used as traditional maps in the sense of using them as a tool to explore / navigate. Now they’re 100% focused on giving you directions. Make it easy to understand the directions, suppress other useless detail because all you need to focus on is the next turn.
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